The applicant has developed various printheads which provide high speed, photographic quality printing. The printheads comprise ink jet nozzles arranged in a close packed array. To provide the photographic quality printing, the nozzles are so arranged so as to provide a resolution of up to 1600 dots per inch (dpi).
The ink jet nozzles are formed using microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology. The use of MEMS technology results in very high speed printing capabilities where pages can be printed at a rate of up to 2 pages per second (for double-sided printing). To facilitate such high speed printing, it is important, firstly, that the paper or print media fed to the printing station of the printer is accurately aligned and capable of the required feed rate with as little likelihood as possible of paper jams or the like occurring. Secondly, the paper must be able to be fed to the printing station at a rate sufficient to use the high speed printing capabilities of the printing station to its fullest extent.